This invention relates to an image processing method, an image processing apparatus, a program and a recording medium which involve production of parallax data of a stereo image.
For example, stereo matching is used to specify a correspondence relationship in a unit of a pixel between two images obtained by image pickup of the same subject from different positions and produce a three-dimensional configuration of the original image required for machine sensing or virtual viewing based on parallax data obtained from the specified correspondence relationship.
However, it is not easy to specify such a correspondence relationship as described above from the ambiguity or complicatedness of the actual environment.
In conventional stereo matching, the correspondence relationship is specified based on a premise that, for example, pixel data in two images for the same subject have an equal luminance.
Related arts are disclosed, for example, Yuri Boykv, Olga Veksler, and Ramin Zabih, “Fast Approximate Energy Minimization via Graph Cuts”, International Conference on Computer Vision, Vol. 1, pp. 377 to 384, 1999 (hereinafter referred to as Non-Patent Document 1), V. Lolmogorov and R. Zabih, “Computing visual correspondence with occlusions using graph cuts”, Journal of Confidence on Computer Vision, Vol. 2, pp. 508 to 515, 2001 (hereinafter referred to as Non-Patent Document 2), Geoffrey Egnal, “Mutual information as a stereo correspondence measure”, Technical Report MS-CIS-00-20, University of Pennsylvania, 2000 (hereinafter refereed to as Non-Patent Document 3), and Junhwan Kim, Vladimir Kolmogorov and Ramin Zabih, “Visual Correspondence Using Energy Minimization and Mutual Information”, International Conference on Computer Vision, vol. 2, pp. 1033 to 1040, 2003 (hereinafter referred to as Non-Patent Document 4).